Update Prices
The Update Prices action recalculates each product’s pricing using the strategy and rules you configured in Pricing Settings, then writes the new values back to Shopify. This page covers when to run it, how to schedule it, and why we deliberately don’t offer the same frequencies as Update Inventory.
What Update Prices Does
For every product in scope, Update Prices:
- Fetches the supplier’s current pricing tiers from PSRESTful.
- Applies your default strategy (MQ, HUNDREDS, or MAP) and any per-supplier or per-brand markup/discount rules.
- Writes the resulting price (and
part_price_arraytier metafield) back to each Shopify variant.
It runs as a background job and emails a summary when it finishes.
Schedule Options
You can pick one of three frequencies from the Update Prices card on the dashboard (click the gear icon to edit):
| Frequency | Behavior | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| On Demand | Never runs automatically. Use Run Now or the bulk action when you need it. | Stores that re-price manually after promos, supplier announcements, or strategy changes. |
| Once a Day | Runs once every 24 hours. | High-velocity catalogs where supplier pricing changes are frequent. |
| Once a Week | Runs once every 7 days. Recommended for most stores. | Catalogs where supplier pricing is stable. |
Why There Is No “Twice a Day”
Update Inventory offers a Twice a Day option because stock levels move constantly: a popular SKU can go from in-stock to out-of-stock within hours, and an oversell is immediately painful for the merchant and the customer.
Pricing does not behave that way. Suppliers typically change list pricing on a quarterly or annual basis, with the occasional mid-season adjustment. Syncing prices twice a day would burn through API quota without changing any actual values on 99% of runs, so we don’t expose that frequency at all.
Why “Once a Week” Is the Recommended Default
Two reasons:
1. Pricing rarely changes. For most catalogs, a weekly sync is more than enough to catch supplier updates before they go stale. Daily syncs are useful for stores that re-quote aggressively or run flash promotions tied to supplier list changes, but they are the exception.
2. Update Prices is expensive in API calls. Refreshing pricing requires several PSRESTful calls per product (a pricing call, often a configuration call, plus a Shopify mutation for each variant). On a catalog of a few thousand products, that is tens of thousands of API calls per run, against both your Shopify rate limit and your PSRESTful daily/monthly quota.
The PSRESTful API Usage Calculator shows the exact call counts for a given catalog size and frequency. Plug in your numbers before switching to a more aggressive schedule, then compare against your plan’s quota.
If your supplier’s pricing is genuinely stable, weekly is plenty. Save your API budget for inventory, where the data actually changes hour to hour.
When to Use Run Now
Even on a weekly schedule, a few situations call for an immediate sync:
- You just changed your default pricing strategy (MQ → MAP, for example).
- You added or edited a markup/discount rule in Pricing Settings.
- A supplier announced a price change you don’t want to wait a week to apply.
- You ran Prefill SanMar or another bulk pricing tool and want to verify the results immediately.
For these one-off needs, Run Now is the right call.
Updating Selected Products Only
You don’t have to re-price your whole catalog every time. From Shopify’s product list, select the products you care about, open More actions > Sync Using PSRESTful, and pick Update Prices. The job runs only against the selected products, which keeps API usage low and is ideal for testing a new pricing rule on a small batch before rolling it out catalog-wide.
See Bulk Actions > Update Prices for the full walkthrough.
Update Prices vs. Update Inventory
| Update Inventory | Update Prices | |
|---|---|---|
| What changes | Stock quantity per variant | Variant price + tier metafield |
| Typical change cadence | Hourly | Quarterly |
| Cost of being stale | High (overselling) | Low (until a supplier change ships) |
| API calls per product | Few | Several |
| Available frequencies | On Demand, Once a Day, Twice a Day, By Collection, By Inventory Location | On Demand, Once a Day, Once a Week |
| Recommended default | Once a Day (or Twice a Day for fast movers) | Once a Week |
Related
- Pricing Configuration — strategies, markup/discount rules, MAP enforcement.
- Inventory & Scheduling — companion settings for stock sync, including the higher-frequency options.
- Bulk Actions — how to run Update Prices on a selected subset of products.
- PSRESTful API Usage Calculator — model API consumption before picking a schedule.